


when sorrows come

by MathildaHilda



Series: What If; Red Dead Redemption Edition [4]
Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games), Red Dead Redemption II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Jake Adler lives, Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Canonical Character Death, What If - Jake Adler lives, character switch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 16:09:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19176778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: "Even the kindest of people can do the most terrible of things."~Jake Adler survives the O'Driscolls' attack on his ranch.His wife, Sadie, does not.





	when sorrows come

**Author's Note:**

> Not so much an AU apart from Jake and Sadie having switched roles, and some minor tweaks
> 
> Title from; “When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions!” - William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act IV, Scene V

“I buried her.”

 

The voice is quiet, blanketed by the still-falling snow and the suffocating covering of every single piece of fabric everyone has at their own disposal and the crackling of the fire.

He’s been given the man’s second fur coat, a button missing, and some suspicious claw marks along one arm, but nonetheless, he still shakes whenever someone shifts in the space that’s been given them. Ambarino’s always been so damned cold, he just never realized just _how_ cold until now.

He peers up at the man from under the mess that is his unwashed hair, eyes dark and empty, and it takes him a moment to fully hear what has been said. He’d heard it as much as he hadn’t, and he wishes he could’ve just snapped awake from a terrible nightmare before the man – Morgan he suspected the man’s name was, if he was to listen to the others at the hideout – had even had to say those three, almost innocent words.

 

(There’s nothing innocent about death, proven well enough by two family graves down New Austin way, and an all too small, well covered, grave up by what once had been something homely and safe.)

 

_‘I buried her.’_

 

He’d buried _her_.

 

Tears, unshed for days now it seemed, chokes his words and he simply nods and gazes back to his pale hands – white from imminent frostbite unless he moves closer to the fire – and the single band of gold glints in the pale light from the candle one of the women keeps watch at in the same way a guard might keep watch on a prisoner, and listens as the broad man shifts.

If he shifts in awkwardness or idleness, he’s not quite sure, but his lowered gaze is soon locked on the photograph that’s pushed under his nose.

Not quite pushed, but it’s kept at such a distance that he could easily shove it aside if he didn’t wish to see it, or if he wanted to take it and hide it somewhere else.

Jake Adler does the latter and takes the wedding photograph, singed around the edges as it is, and pushes it into the folds of the coat, keeps it hidden and close to whatever heart he has left that hasn’t been buried with her up at the little cabin that had once been hope and home.

“Got this from her, as well. Thought you might want it.”

The ring fell from gloved hands into Jake’s still ones, and he wished so Goddamn much that he hadn’t been the one out hunting the night the bastards sought shelter and fun from an oncoming storm.

Jake doesn’t hear the man step outside into the cold; only feels the wind once it bites into his skin.

The wedding band is colder still, resting in his hands.

 

~

 

He hears the shouting from outside, hears how Morgan and one other man, Mexican by the sound of his accent, shouts from outside for help.

Jake would’ve exited the cabin, just to stop being idle, had he not been held back by a soft hand from Miss Jones, and a stern gaze from the woman who seemed to oversee most things.

He’d moved enough, however, to cause the wound to his shoulder to shift far too much for his limb’s liking, and he could only watch in sudden fatigue, how a company of two men, the sometimes stone-faced Miss Roberts, and the appearance of what could, without a doubt, be called her husband, in the doorway of their little cabin.

Jake had seen wounds like those before, but only on dead men.

John Marston would have to be one hell of a man to keep from getting eaten by beasts the size of donkeys, far up over Big Valley, where they were no bigger than large dogs.

Miss Jones had a soft hand still on his shoulder when the man suddenly grew very, very quiet.

 

~

 

“Bet we make for a sorry sight.” John Marston says from the cot where they lowered him not even two days ago. His voice is low, rasped in a way that could both’ve been made when the boy became a man or made by living the life he did, and his one visible eye is slightly glassy.

Had Jake not known better when they’d brought him in, and the man had gone both still and quiet enough for Jake to contemplate the appearance of the Reverend – who’d been slumbering in the corner despite the ruckus – he’d suspect the man to be on death’s door.

He wasn’t, and perhaps he should thank God for that, even though he knew nothing of the man other than what everyone else said. The only reason Jake could find it in him to maybe thank God would be because no one else – other than the man who’d been dead when Jake had been brought to their little camp – had died since his Sadie barely a week ago.

Jake hadn’t been to a church since they’d gotten married, and even before then, he’d done everything in his power to keep from having to go – once having hidden underneath a pigsty to keep his mother from finding him – but he doubted God would care much _where_ one exactly was when the subject of prayer or thanks came up in hushed and earnest conversation.

“I guess we do.” He replies and wipes at his nose where the cold has now turned it a bright red. Sadie used to laugh at the sights they’d make for strangers coming up and down the roads when they were out and about, but Jake had always thought it’d made her all the more endearing.

 

(Especially since he was the only other person that’d gotten the girl to ever blush, be it up or down, in other matters than the cold.)

 

“John.” The man says in introduction and reaches out a shaky hand in greeting. Jake takes it with little hesitation, not wanting to remind the man that they’d done this exact thing the hours before he slept for half a day with his woman sitting next to him, hunched in thought and her own grief, her boy kept far away from the sight of – what Jake assumed – his father.

“Jake.” He says in turn, shakes his hand with his own, and smiles something that doesn’t even reach halfway.

“I’m sorry,” Jake says when John winces from even the lightest of shaking, and John says it in turn, strained voice sounding drained of anything resembling energy when he remembers just why exactly Jake is sitting in the same little cabin as him.

None of them says it’s alright.

 

~

 

Jake suspects that the only reason no one offers him a gun is because they’re both scarce on ammunition and because they’d barely trust a widower with protecting others seeing the state he was in, no matter the circumstances.

So, he’s not surprised when a bunch of them ride out twice and give other people than him the purpose of guns and protection. He’s not angry either, over the fact, but he doesn’t miss the way the women eye him once he lowers himself on his own little tattered bedroll once the men are all gone.

He _is_ surprised; however, the first time they come back, and Morgan rides in not an hour later with a wailing bastard on his horse.

He sits near John again, Miss Roberts close and feeding him spoonfuls of the cook’s stew when Mister Van der Linde spouts something about what sounds an awful lot like ‘ _O’Driscoll.’_

Jake shoulders the door open and stands outside in the falling snow, long after the alleged O’Driscoll’s been hauled off to the barn, and Morgan stares at him, sighs, and retreats into his own cabin, and for one moment, the world consists of nothing but Jake Adler, the ghost of his wife, and the soft fallings of May snow.

 

 

They leave Colter not too much later, after Morgan, once again, is the last to return to camp, and Jake has loaned some leather straps from the young black boy, Mister Summers.

He’s loaned it in the sense of returning it later, but the boy had looked at him, laughed, and told him to keep it. Plenty where that came from, he’d said, but Jake was of the mind that the whole group was low on a lot of things.

Money, especially and Jake, had no good idea of just how much leather cost in the nearest town ever since he and Sadie escaped up the mountain.

He has it looped around his neck now, Sadie’s ring nestling in the hollow of his throat, when he does his very best to haul crates and sacks up on the wagons, even with his arm still trapped in a sling and his side burning like wildfire whenever he decides it’s a good idea to overexert himself.

He does a poor job of helping them drag John onto the back of Mister Van der Linde’s wagon, but he does his best without jostling the man too much and tosses a blanket up to Mister Williamson, the big bear of a man trying his best not to step on the smaller man as he catches it.

Jake does try not to look, fails quite spectacularly at it, at the O’Driscoll when he’s being tied down to the back of one the horses. He’s tied down to the horse Morgan took from the ranch, and, not to speak too ill of animals, he wouldn’t be too sad if the both of them took a sudden ride off the Cumberland Falls on their way to Valentine.

But Morgan likes the horse enough, so he simply stares at the O’Driscoll’s quiet, sullen form, as the horse trots evenly down the mountainside, even when the bastard does puke over the side of it. It earns the bastard a nip across the neck by Mister Summers’ reins, courtesy of Morgan’s bark from further down the line. Mister Williamson laughs somewhere further up the way when the O’Driscoll yelps in pain and surprise.

He helps somewhat once they reach new ground by washing down the very same spotted bay. The bastard’s tied up and away, but not far enough for the two of them to not lock eyes for a second.

The poor – or not so poor – boy startles something fierce and slips against the tree, causing the camp cook to almost slice his finger when he’s startled in turn, and Jake knows, even though the boy never seemed to get any food at Colter, that the boy wouldn’t be getting a meal anytime soon.

 

~

 

Miss Grimshaw hands him some money from the meager camp savings once it’s been decided that he is too small to fit into any hand-me-downs from either Misters Williamson or Morgan without it looking as if though it was worn by an overgrown child, and too large in some areas to fit into the ragged clothing that seemed to be all Mister Marston owned.

“It ain’t stealing if it’s for someone who needs it.” She says when he stutters that Mister Van der Linde might see it as such and borrows one of the Walkers into town. He comes back not too long later, to the return party of someone who seems much happier to be back than some folk seem to find him _being_ back.

The short, Irish feller balances on some crates and explains the rules of partying, but the quiet is far more enjoyable he finds, and he looks after the horses, avoids the O’Driscoll as if though he has the plague, and feigns a smile whenever anyone even remotely drunk tries to strike up conversation.

He sleeps through most of the night, even if the Irish man – Sean – makes an awful lot of noise and demands to be heard by everything and everyone.

 

~

 

He doesn’t leave Horseshoe for a long while, not until it’s decided that they should search for other grounds, since Misters Morgan, Van der Linde, and Marston and, for some reason, Herr Strauss, seems to have stirred up an awful lot of trouble for such a short stay in such a small town.

He volunteers to ride into town to see what’s what before they pack up everything and heads southward, and Mister Van der Linde allows it with a nod and something akin to a complementary sound.

He’s never been out of Horseshoe save for the shopping trip he took to gather himself something that fit, favoring his shoulder and own grief over the troubles of the group that’s taken him in, but the town is close enough for him not to get lost on the short ride there and back.

He questions the sheriff, who’s yelling orders to men trying to scramble together something that’s most likely supposed to be an army. It falls short, of at the very least fifty men, and the sheriff sends five men out in either direction alongside volunteers from the town itself.

It doesn’t escape Jake in the slightest how the man sends men out in all the directions but the right one. Either Mister Morgan led them on one Hell of a goose chase, or the men are too concussed by the firefight to understand the direction a notorious outlaw took as a way of escape.

The sheriff himself sits down on a three-legged stool and answers every question with a sigh and a hand twirling his mustache.

“Goddamn outlaws.” Is what he says, and curses the existence of outlaws and Pinkertons alike, accepts the cigarette Jake offers, and the light with it. Jake chuckles at the man’s tirade, thanks him for wanting to protect the town, and rides back up to Horseshoe with not one man in sight.

He catches the wagon train before they can fully exit Scarlet Meadows, relays what he’s seen and been told, and trots behind the rest of the way until Mister Morgan comes into view down the path.

He dreamt of Sadie the nights at Horseshoe, slept awful little at Colter, and doesn’t quite know which phase he exists in now. He ain’t sleeping too much, ain’t ever dreaming save for when it’s morning, and he can just remember Sadie looking beautiful in the early morning lights back home.

 

(Back home; either New Austin or Ambarino. Either way, she had always been beautiful.)

 

He follows Mister Morgan  (“ _just call me Arthur, Mister Adler,”_ ) to the town, buys himself his first gun since the other was either stolen or burnt in the rubble of his home, and allows the other man to drive them past camp, just to allow the gang a semblance of peace before they release Hell on the idiots following them.

Jake shoots two through the skull, and Arthur shoots the rest as they flee, watch as they drop, and can just imagine Fat Tommy dropping as well. Arthur curses him out, but all he does is stare back, because why the Hell not?

Those fellers’ needed shootin’, so _why. The Hell. Not?_

Jake doesn’t say much on the way back, other than wondering aloud just what exactly Mister Pearson had stated in that letter of his, and confounds about the writings of Arthur Morgan in his own, personal journal.

The man only shoots down the suggestion of reading his journal, but all the same, he does thank him for riding out with him. Even if it only were shopping.

 

~

 

He goes hunting with Mister Smith on one occasion, a reluctant Mister Marston following behind, since he’s got little else to do other than chase leads that, in the end, seems to lead nowhere.

They haul three deer, five rabbits, and a suspicious-looking pelt, courtesy of Marston, into camp just in time for the latter man to be sent off to one of the two giant houses. Jake takes the brunt of the skinning from both Pearson and Smith, allowing his hands to do other things than focus on the want for revenge.

Ain’t too many O’Driscolls’ come this way, but enough Raiders run around for something to mean _something_.

He skins the last deer, offers the pelt to Pearson, and has the thing strung up by the time Arthur comes back fuming through the ears, Marston trying to levee a situation that’s odd at the worst of times, and Mister Escuella simply sauntering off toward his guitar, turning a deaf ear to the two men.

“How was I supposed to know?” Comes Marston's voice once Jake tugs at the meat to try and find a good place to start cutting.

“Maybe use your brain for once, Marston. The bastard’s playin’ us! This whole Goddamn county is!” Arthur snaps back, and Jake really doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of an argument with either man.

The last of the meat is handed off to the pot, and the pot itself is over the fire when Arthur and Mister Maguire comes back that night – when Uncle has taken to singing Godawful songs around the fire, and the Reverend is drunker than the town drunk – both smelling a suspicious lot like smoke.

Jake doesn’t ask, doesn’t have to since Sean goes into a tirade of the fun things he’d done in Donegal that was an awful lot like burning the cotton fields of the Braithwaites’. He doesn’t ask, in the same sense that he didn’t ask about the shootout in town following Arthur’s and Mister Matthews’ disappearance from camp one evening, all thanks to the Braithwaite’s love of unlawful beverages.

He doesn’t really have to since secrets seem to be nonexistent in a camp of this size.

 

 

Later, not _too_ much later, he doesn’t have to ask because Mister Van der Linde shouts his throat raw at the camp cook, and Mister Bell hides in the back of everything with an odd look on his face.

Marston paces, offers to ride out with his gun and his horse, and Mister Smith offers to come with him, and Jake is almost strapping his gun belt around his waist when Mister Van der Linde shoots the ideas down and says something along the lines of; _“they’d be expecting us.”_

Marston looks damn well ready to throw caution to the wind for the sake of his brother, but Abigail keeps him in place with a stern, yet worried, gaze and forces him to stay.

They needn’t worry - although they all do, in some ways at the very least - since Arthur rides in on the big mare he’d bought in Valentine, slides off it, and collides with the ground hard enough to take the wind out of anyone; wounded or not.

Jake keeps vigil one of the nights - when they’ve all collectively forced Dutch, Mister Matthews and John into their respective bedrolls - and he wonders, idly, why dying has to be such a big affair at times.

Arthur’s face is flushed, his shoulder bandaged in the same way Jake’s was, and his own shoulder throbs in memory when he looks at the man. Jake gets the fleeting picture through his mind that this might be what it’d be like to watch over sick children. Arthur Morgan ain’t a child, but the fever makes him seem different.

Jake forces Mister Matthews from his needed sleep, not even ten minutes later, when Morgan is on the verge of fever-induced tears.

 

(Jake’d always wished to die at home, safe and loved. Now, he doubted he’d get either of those things, and the one thing he could hope for would be that it’d be quick.

It’s quick for Sean, he sees later, when Brown Jack is slicked with blood and Mister Matthews, yet again, is anything but a safe harbor in a wild storm once someone does something to provoke a reaction.

Jake buries the boy with Kieran – grudgingly– and Bill, Reverend Swanson watching over it and saying some words that make half a sense when very little seems to _actually_ make sense.)

 

 

He greets the men with a flick of the repeater once they leave, and he greets them back with the lift of the lantern and the nod of his hat. He doesn’t say anything to either one, seeing as young Jack isn’t with them, and the plume of smoke stands high above the treetops.

 

 

Jake holds his gun in a white-knuckled grip when the agents step down the path toward them, escorted so by Lenny, and watches the two exchange words with Dutch. He holds his gun just so, and cocks the hammer just like everyone else, even if it’s only to prove a point.

It might be that he doesn’t always agree with the man, but he owes the man too much to stand idly by and watch.

He sees Marston and Arthur off with a wave of the hand, packs up the tents, and loads up the wagons and the horses, the little brown mare nuzzling his palm for anything sweet.

To say that he spoils the horse would be an understatement, but he’s spoiled plenty of horses in his life, and it’s not like he’s prepared to stop.

And, to say that they’ve moved up in the world when they enter through the wide, stone arched gates, would be an even bigger understatement, because there’s little to no way that Jake can accept that this place would be an improvement from the last, when most everyone slept in tents and on bedrolls on the ground.

 

(Thinks the man who’s lived his whole life in a rickety farmhouse, and then in an even more rickety one once he moved up Ambarino with Sadie.

At least his homes didn’t have giant holes in them in most places.)

 

Little Jack comes back within two days, Kieran finally stops pacing a hole in the ground, and Karen gets shitfaced drunk and sleeps for almost the entire day after the party the night before.

Karen gets even drunker when Kieran comes through the gates with his head in his hands.

 

 

Jake, in his raged state, had expected to be at least a little stopped by those taking up cover in the manor house, but no one comes except for Arthur, and by then the most part of the O’Driscoll bastards are dead.

He drives the knife through the man’s chest, picks up his gun with a, no doubt, wild look in his eyes, and goes on one final rampage before he’s almost prepared to have a bullet through the head before the day’s done.

He survives the rampage, doesn’t flinch when Arthur reaches for the gun, and helps with dumping the dead with the gators. The gators are even less bloodthirsty bastards than the O’Driscolls, and it does give him a wrong kind of glee watching the reptiles tear the dead apart.

Jake knows the look he gets from Arthur, and sometimes Marston, but it doesn’t bother him as much as it probably should’ve done.

But he does sit down by one of the tables, late in the night once most have gone to sleep, and stares at the invisible blood on his hands. Had he owned a mirror, maybe he’d’ve seen the way the blood – invisible – glistened in his eyes and on his cheeks.

Had he owned a mirror, maybe he’d’ve seen the way his splattered, invisible blood had looked so much like Sadie’s had, once the monsters had been done with her.

But for now, he only sits at the table and tries not to let his fingers tremble too much in the dulling light from the campfire.

 

 

“How are you?” Comes a soft voice, and Jake blinks at first before he looks to see Mister Matthews settle down in front of him, a lukewarm bowl of stew in either hand. He sets one down in front of him, and Jake suddenly feels just how hungry he actually is.

“Alright. I guess.”

“Guessing’s never good.” The older man says and takes a spoonful, chewing it as he looks at him. The stew, once Jake looks down into it, looks an awful lot like blood.

But he takes a spoonful himself and smiles by curling the corners of his mouth and pushes the spoon into his mouth. It does require some seasoning, but it’s not too bad.

“Then, I don’t know, Mister Matthews.” He says and forces himself to swallow.

Hosea’s quiet for a moment then set his spoon down. Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance, but it’s too far to tell when it’ll strike close to them.

“You expected to feel different,” he says, and Jake snaps his head up from his stew. There’s a smile, soft and curled, on Hosea’s lips. “It’ll take time, dear boy. It’ll never go away, no matter how badly you want to change it, but eventually, you will feel a little different.”

He seems to muse his own words for a bit, then adds, “you won’t feel like you did before, but it’ll be a little better.”

“Don’t think revenge and grief were suited for folk like me.”

“Then, we are one and the same, Mister Adler,” Hosea replies and takes another spoonful. “I take it, you know a bit what this’s like,” Jake says but doesn’t ask.

Hosea simply nods.

“Even the kindest of people can do the most terrible of things.” He says after a while of silence save for the snoring and farting from the camp occupants, and the sounds of metal against metal as they scrape the bowls clean.

“What’s that?” Jake asks, looks up again when the stew has stopped resembling blood.

“Something, my wife, used to say to me years ago. I never really believed her, but now,” Hosea doesn’t gesture, but it was almost as if he did.

“Guess I’m proof of that.”

“I guess we both are,” Hosea says in turn and dumps the spoon in the bowl with a sharp clang, earning a particularly loud fart from Bill further aways in reply.

“We should probably stop guessing,” Jake says, and the two share one last laugh before all Hell, once again, breaks loose.

 

 

It’s Karen, for once not drunk, who sees the horse barreling down the path toward camp. She barely has time to shout a question before Abigail calls out.

Charles comes in on Taima, a pack of familiar horses following closely behind, not too much later, and tells them of a possible place to lie low, and it becomes the two of them’s job to clear it out good enough.

Charles leads the way, Jake follows on his mare, and they barely stop until they reach the swamp, swings off their horses, and Jake has to bite his tongue to keep from asking questions. No doubt everyone had them, but there’s no chance in Hell they can ask them out here, where trees have ears and where even Pinkertons can sometimes be dumb enough to check.

Charles does tell him when his coat is soaked with mud and his boots, no doubt contains a toad or two, and when Jake has leveled the last shot on the dumb bastards living in the swamp.

Charles tells him about the law showing up too fast, of Hosea staring down death with a straight back and a resolute calmness no one else had seemed to have in such a situation. At the very least, not a situation such as that that either of them had seen before.

He tells him, once they dump the bodies in the swamp, about Lenny’s charge on the roof and the bullet, and, in the end, how Charles himself lured the lawmen away from the harbor in an attempt at freedom for the rest.

The rest, who are now gone.

Jake feels like kicking a gator by the time the caravans find their way down the road. They spend an hour or so pushing one loose from the mud, and then it’s a hundred more hours of wondering just what exactly they’re supposed to do now.

It’s a month before the five missing boys return, almost heralded like heroes, and it’s a month that makes him want to crawl into a hole and hide.

Leadership never was anything for him, but he does his best, and he sends hunting parties and sends Charles on both that and a scouting mission in case any Nite Folk wishes to have their land back, or if the Pinkertons have become a little braver than previously thought.

They steal Hosea and Lenny back, bury them proper and together with only himself, Charles and Abigail in attendance, but Jake does give the Reverend permission to go to the site and bless it as much as he wants, and as much as the dead would’ve wanted.

It’s a month, and there’s an odd shade of glee in him when the boys’ trip through the door one by one. Maybe not so much glee when it comes to Micah’s sudden appearance, but all the rest are very welcome.

Then Agent Milton shoots their temporary sanctuary halfway to Hell, and Jake desperately wishes to put the bastard in the ground. He doesn’t get to do it, though, and he crouches more than shoots once Arthur takes control of the Gatling Gun.

He doesn’t complain about the lack of use he has for his firearm, but he does complain about the threat of getting a friendly bullet through the head.

 

(He doesn’t tell Arthur that, but he doubts he’d get anything but a scoff of a laugh in reply.)

 

And when they settle in a cave, Jake _knows_ Dutch must’ve gone off the deep end.

 

~

 

It doesn’t take much convincing from either his side or Arthur’s to decide to rescue Marston from his untimely imprisonment. What does take time, though, is getting away enough to be able to do it.

People had always turned to Dutch or Hosea when it came to trouble, and Arthur’s gone most days anyway, so the only thing Jake can really do to get a hold of the hot air balloon and send Arthur skyward with Arturo - seeing as the basket doesn’t take any more than two people according to the joyful, odd man – is to say that he’s going hunting and might take the time to hunt _a lot_.

 

(And hopefully, escape some of the questions he got from people he never would’ve thought would take pointers from him.

And, there’s always the hope of running into more O’Driscolls’ while you’re at it.)

 

He almost wishes he could leave, but he wonders - the night before, he decides to go back to Pearson with a bear pelt and half an elk stuffed in his saddlebags - what exactly it would be that he left behind.

 

 

Rescuing Marston takes a little more out of both of them than he perhaps realize at first, and Jake takes the oars and turns a deaf ear to the complaints from Morgan, who takes the position of gunman despite his own protest, and listens to the man wheeze into the crook of his elbow once they position the boat back at Copperhead Landing.

He almost offers to help the man, but they both set their sights on Marston, who struggles far more than the sick man, in getting up on the small mare’s rump. They hoist him up together, Jake trying to take most of the starved man’s weight, and Arthur’s up on his own horse before Jake can say otherwise.

Jake stares from the side once Micah sidles up to Dutch, and John tries his best to keep from shouting all the things they’d done to him in prison, into the older man’s face. He doesn’t interact, thinks to himself that it is more their argument than his, but Arthur steps up with a paling face and wheezing chest and explains just why exactly he’d disagreed.

There’s little explanation other than not wanting to follow Dutch’s rules, but Jake’s heard what became of Molly, so he decides, against his own better judgment, to keep his mouth shut.

He ain’t a coward. But he ain’t brave neither.

 

~

 

Why he must play the gentleman, the Jake Adler of 1899 will never understand. Neither would the previous incarnations of him, but the one from 1899 never will fully understand why the package in his arms contains a bright yellow coat and a hat that make him look like one of them giraffes in the storybooks his momma had read to him when he was young.

Colm O’Driscoll hangs, not too early but far too late, and Jake Adler starts a shootout in the streets of Saint Denis, where the only thing that exists are men in false masks and hats made to be shot off by angry widows and widowers.

Colm O’Driscoll hangs, and Arthur follows him to West Elizabeth and shoots the rest of them. Fat Tommy drops with the flick of a knife, and Jake almost wishes the bastard was fatter so that there would be more to cut.

But the O’Driscolls’ are dead and done, and Jake Adler, for once, feels a little less like a widower.

 

 

He’d decided early on, that there was one person he’d follow into battle, after his own wife who could’ve fought an entire army and won with only a sidearm, and that person happened to be Arthur Morgan.

He doesn’t do the blind thing and follow Dutch down the side of the factory – one more tweak on Cornwall’s dead nose – and instead rides beside the other men down the side of the hill.

He is fighting an army, something he never thought he’d do. And he never could’ve expected to fight an army as lousy as this one.

They fight, take down the men one by one, and all seems fine until Arthur stumbles out of the factory with the prince bleeding over his shoulder. Arthur accuses, Paytah lifts the boy up on Arthur’s horse, and Arthur accuses some more and doesn’t allow more companions than Paytah and Charles, something Jake accepts with a nod and a huff in Dutch’s direction.

The man who’d once saved his life had become the very person Jake had sworn never to become.

Selfish and delusional in a way that could, for better or worse, be seen in different lights and through different eyes.

 

 

He’s finally allowed to go robbing with them, now that his hands have little to do when there’re no more O’Driscoll boys left, and what it does do to him, is leave him with a sack of money he doesn’t want and the afterimage of a dead would’ve-been brother.

He takes Van Horn with Arthur once Tilly rides through the woods with young Jack, and Jake wipes his nose and declares that there’s no one else who will get Abigail back unless they do it.

So, they do it.

And Jake Adler says his goodbyes to the man who’d become a constant, even if ‘constant’ existed for only a few months.

 

~

 

He’s given his tent up to Abigail and Jack and Tilly and sits out by the fire to watch the road when the sounds of hooves on damp sand reach his ears.

He’s up and readying his rifle by the time he recognizes the shape on the horse.

“John?” He calls, gets a wave in reply, and in the next moment, the man tips sideways off the horse and lands on flat feet, stumbling as he does, hat seemingly weighing down his head as he moves toward them.

“Abigail. Get up.” He mumbles, and nudges the tent with his foot, knowing full well that the woman isn’t asleep. And, sure enough, the woman is out of the tent and has her arms around the wounded man before Jake can call out twice.

“Arthur said-, he said you’d-,”

“Guess he was mistaken,” John says, sounding tired as the grave, and leans his forehead against hers.

 _‘Guessing’s never good.’_ Hosea’s voice comes through Jake’s thoughts, but all he does is smile and accept the hand John offers.

Both in assistance, greeting and thanks, without saying a word.

 

~

 

They part like that, once John’s told them most everything that went down on that mountain and in the caves, before the Pinkertons’ showed up, and Tilly finds her way on her own before they can reach the outskirts of New Hanover.

Jake leaves them a bit later, once the money is evenly split between them, and Tilly has taken her share to God knows where, and takes his horse northwest.

It takes a while to become something you were never supposed to be, but within five years or less, he’s stopped taking up with sheriffs’ looking for help and the occasional bounty-hunting gang.

It takes some time, wherein he bought himself a new horse once the mare got too old to want other things than graze and sleep, but eventually, he is the man to ask very politely if maybe one can cut in on the bounty hunting.

It very rarely goes their way, but often the seekers come out of the arguments alive, with only their tails tucked between their legs. On some occasions, yes, he does put a bullet in someone’s foot, but that is only every sparsely enough so that they won’t ask a second time.

He finds a Jim Milton down by Strawberry when he steps into the shop to purchase his meals for the coming weeks, and doesn’t interact with the man other than in a telegram sent from Riggs Station, happenstance it ain’t _the_ Jim Milton.

But, turns out it _is_ _the_ Jim Milton, and it only takes a few bounties later for the two to meet up after the eight years that’s passed, with a sheepish and older John Marston looking for some dishonest, and sometimes honest, work.

They both look the same, no doubt, albeit a little older, and it doesn’t feel too odd from the various hunting trips the two took once they’d settled by Clemens Point, once they ride down to Strawberry and chase down an accountant with a gift for writing the wrong things on the right papers.

It goes on like that. Marston buys himself a ranch, builds a house, and a barn fit for a woman (much like Jake had done for Sadie, but the woman had been a hard one to impress), and now and again they ride out for a bounty to pay off the loan Marston took.

It goes on like that, and then Jake has little to say past the words _“Micah Bell.”_

Eight years melt away, and they meet, once again, in the soft fallings of May snow.

 

~

 

Charles goes North, Jake goes South, and the Marstons’ stay, once everything’s done and over and Abigail’s taken the Marston name in front of God.

But it only takes four years.

 

 

They meet down Blackwater way a few weeks after Dutch falls from the mountainside, and Beecher’s Hope is stained with the blood of yet another brother, fallen for mistakes that defined who he was, and the papers are filled with little else but lies told by rich men.

Abigail wrote, in tear-filled letters, of old enemies’ revenge, and of John Marston’s death, and it was enough for both of them to head to what had once been home and bid their goodbyes, even if they had already done so in other manners than this.

Jake takes the time he hadn’t taken before, to meet Arthur’s grave that faces West, says something little that has no broad meaning but for the two of them, one of them long gone, and he goes to meet the others’ graves as well.

 

 

Lastly, before he heads back down South, he presses his cold fingers to his Sadie’s grave, way up where he last felt safe, fifteen years previous, and wishes for something that couldn’t exist.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com) here!


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